The sound of something hard slamming into the barricaded door came with a rhythm.
Bang.
Ten seconds.
Bang.
Ten more.
Inside, a man sat in a relaxed armchair, a Zippo in hand. He flicked the flame on and off in perfect counterpoint to the pounding. His face was all hard lines and deep wrinkles, age radiating from him like heat off sun-burnt stone.
He wore a full suit—as if this were any ordinary end to an ordinary day—and waited.
Determined.
Prepared.
Ready for his last trade.
Between the banging and the metallic click of the lighter, another sound threaded through the quiet: a soft, constant fizzle, like an autumn breeze rummaging through dry leaves on a forest floor. The smell that followed was unmistakable to anyone who had survived this long.
Rotting meat.
Not the kind you ever wanted to eat anyway.
Before everything went mad, he had been a salesman. Not a bad one—just the kind who sold people things they didn’t truly need. He knew how to make anything sound useful, how to tilt reality a little to one side until the useless appeared necessary.
He had learned early that ethics don’t pay the bills. There is no external force drawing the line between “acceptable” and “morally depraved.”
You draw it yourself.
And you redraw it when you need to.
He didn’t think he’d ever done anything wrong.
He only filled a need.
The people outside—the ones banging on his door—had formed very different opinions.
He knew very well what they had come for.
***
His eyes drifted to the wall, where four large terrariums were stacked inside an old bookcase. The other sound—the soft fizzling, the whispering rustle—came from there.
At a glance, the bottoms looked filled with nothing more than pale wood shavings. But if you stared long enough, let your gaze settle and your stomach harden, the illusion broke.
It moved.
Anyone with merely decent eyesight would have to step closer to see it properly:
thousands of white, oily maggots writhing in slow waves across the glass floor, feeding on hunks of rotting meat.
Bang. Click. Fizzle. Click.
He tried to let his mind wander into the past, a few months ago, when it all went mad.
A knock on the door, a wave through the window—back then, when everything was still bearable. His neighbor: a proud man, a reverend. Three children, a loyal wife.
“You still have food?” the reverend asked, eyes sharp. They had never gotten along well.
The man nodded and showed him a glass bottle. Inside it, dried, oily maggots clung to the sides.
“Are you insane?” the reverend laughed. “Carrion crawlers aren't food.”
The man shrugged. “Not obligated,” he said, wanting to shut the door quickly—to stop the man’s laughter from echoing through his home.
But he knew something the reverend didn’t.
Scarcity was coming.
And when it did, it would come for everyone.
Everyone except him.
He and his maggots were safe.
It was easier in those days. Food rotted in stages—first the fresh meat as people lost electricity, then the sealed packages, which could last for weeks.
Bang. Click. Fizzle. Click.
The man was hurled back to the present. He knew very well the reverend was outside—one thing on his mind. If only, if only he had not made that first sale.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
That first sale came back to him now.
A smile—almost a smirk—pulled at his lips as he remembered it.
The very same smile he’d worn when his neighbor had first come. He hadn’t dared knock after laughing at him, but the old man had seen him pointing through the window at the terrariums.
He opened the door.
“What are you feeding the ungodly creatures?” the reverend asked. His voice was dry, dulled with hunger.
“Meat,” the old man said, as neutral as if he couldn’t care less. “Rotten meat. Dangerous for humans.” His pitch to sell the little maggots.
The reverend was clearly disgusted. But still the question came: “Can I have some?”
Within a fortnight, the whole town had become his client. Back then, he had ten times as many terrariums, stacked in every corner of his house like the ribs of some great mechanical beast. He made certain the curtains were closed—to hide the disgust as much as possible.
At night he went out searching for carrion—first in trash cans, later dead pets; even later, other meats joined the mix. His maggots grew fat on what he brought them, and in return they made him the wealthiest man left in town.
Of course, it all went to shit.
The meat dried up.
The people who remained were hardened survivors—lean, stubborn; much less meat went to waste, nothing had time to rot anymore. Even the dying seemed to die slower.
He was down to his last four terrariums now, unable to feed his business. The white, writhing swarms had shrunk; their hunger exceeded his ability to satisfy it.
Then, last week, the neighbour came again.
Each visit, his trades had grown cheaper, less valuable, more desperate. As scarcity tightened its grip, the price of his maggots had risen until they were worth ten times their weight in gold. The neighbour had nothing left that mattered.
He had pleaded—first for a discount, then for mercy, then simply for survival. Not for himself alone, but for his family.
The salesman took pity and gave him one of his last bottles.
“That’s not enough,” the neighbour had said. Hunger shared his voice now. Contempt mixed in. Hate.
“My daughter is sick,” his neighbor told him. “She needs food.”
“I’m sorry,” was all the man could say. “There is no more meat to feed them.”
Bang. Click. Fizzle. Click.
The door almost came unhinged; it was nearly done.
The man shook off the thought and returned to his last mistake—his last conversation with the neighbour.
“My daughter is dead. Thought you should know that,” the neighbour said when he returned. The man offered his condolences—to a man who talked more and more like a predator.
“God is gone,” the reverend murmured, his eyes locking on the terrariums.
“Do they eat all meat?” he then asked. The smirk on his face was heavy with grief but unmistakably there—easily mistaken for a grimace.
The man had refused at first—not giving away his scheme, keeping it a secret.
But refusal is a luxury of the well-fed. Still he refused, played it hard, made it seem it was the first time he had contemplated it.
His neighbour told him more would die of hunger if he didn’t.
After all, it was the maggots they ate—not the meat.
Eventually, the old man made it look as though he understood there was no choice—at least not one that ended with all of them alive.
The reverend brought his dead daughter to the old man’s door.
Left her there.
The old man did not ask for help as he prepared the maggot chambers.
***
He looked at the top terrarium.
It was still visible—barely—half swallowed under a restless blanket of white bodies as his creatures searched for the last scraps of sustenance.
Two days after the trade, the neighbour had returned.
He had brought others with him.
He came raging, demanding to see his daughter, screaming to the others that the maggots had eaten human flesh all along.
The salesman refused to let them in.
The look in the men’s eyes unsettled him. Too much strength. Too much heat. He should have fed the neighbour less. Should have kept him weak.
But the neighbour ran around the garden, smashed a window, pulled the curtains aside, and pointed at the terrariums for all to see.
They saw the room.
They saw the terrariums.
They knew—instantly—what they were eating.
On the top shelf, they caught sight of the skull.
And the way the maggots still moved around it.
The neighbour fell to his knees.
His breath broke.
For a heartbeat, it felt as though his tears and screams—and the grief twisting into something sharp—were aimed like a smirk and a wink at the old man himself.
“You monster!” he screamed. “We are coming for you!”
The old man was already standing across the room, a shotgun raised and aimed at the window.
The standoff held for a moment—just long enough for both to see the truth in each other’s eyes:
the salesman, knowing he had been tricked;
the reverend, blaming it all on him.
And now here they were.
Bang. Click. Fizzle. Click.
Not long now.
Bang. Click. Fizzle. Click—CRACK.
The first split appeared in the barricaded door.
Two, maybe three more hits, and they would be inside.
He knew it.
He had prepared for this.
***
Bang. Click. Fizzle. Click—WHAM.
The door finally gave out.
Six large, furious men surged inside.
One of them shot him in the stomach.
Idiots, he thought as the impact rocked him. Bullets are so expensive—and I’m not going anywhere.
Their anger wavered, curdled, turned to panic.
Because now they saw the chair.
The bag.
The crates.
The bottles of flammable liquor.
The loose bullets.
The grenades.
All arranged around him like pieces in a lesson, a lesson they should have learned earlier.
He smiled.
And with that same steady rhythm—
Bang. Click. Fizzle. Click—
He dropped the Zippo.
